Most people that we speak to have no idea which country their website is physically hosted. The geographical location of the servers can have a significant impact on search engine results and SEO.
Google, for example uses a combination of your server location and the domain suffix (e.g. .co.uk, .com) to work out the country of origin of the website. Domains that have a .com suffix are not country specific, so combine that with offshore hosting in say the US and you are going to find it quite difficult to appear on google.co.uk as a UK based search. In this particular example the location of your servers is extremely important.
If you are a UK based business it is worth checking where your website is hosted, especially if your domain suffix is .com. You may be wasting your SEO budget on optimising your site when the actual location of the server is causing you problems.
In today’s economy, the price of hosting is often cited as being important in the decision making process. This relatively small difference in actual price between offshore and UK based hosting could cost you considerably in terms of your marketing budget and sales.
Offshore hosting also has another challenge, and that is speed. Servers based in the US for example will risk displaying more slowly in countries such as the UK, due to the huge distances involved. Site speed is important for SEO and also paid search. For PPC a slow site affects your quality score and ultimately how much you get charged for paid search marketing.
When buying hosting, you should consider your server location. If you have hosting already, check where it is based. Moving hosting can be time consuming and expensive, so it’s better to consider it right at the start of your website development.
Google does offer a facility in their Webmaster Console to be able to adjust the Geographic targeting, we prefer to use a combination of all of UK based hosting and setting the correct targeting for the business with Google.
